SOURCE: "William Cobbett," in Closer to Home: Writers and Places in England, 1780-1830, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 67-86.

In the following essay, Sale discourses on Cobbett's significance and the nature of his philosophical outlook, referring recurrently to Rural Rides.

Cobbett wrote a shelf of books, including the Political Register, which once a week for many years offered itself as the political and economic conscience of England. He was born in 1763 and had a long career that to some looks like failure and to others like success. For instance, it is frequently said that Cobbett was the single person most responsible for the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832; he has admirers who feel he was wrong to settle for so little an achievement. Presumably because he is not "literary," he is missing from most anthologies of English literature, even one that devotes seventy-five pages to Carlyle...